The blueprint covered the floor in front of her, and she'd been staring at it for hours.

  One page. Every system in Napoleon's body rendered in lines so small and dense she'd drawn them in stages, stopping when her hand cramped. She had the sphere from the alpha sitting beside her knee, and every thirty minutes or so she'd touch one finger to its surface, feel the filaments of the Blue threads slide out from her fingertips before she'd consciously decided to call them, let them run for two or three seconds, pull back before the data got unmanageable, and add more notation to the margins.

  Short bursts. Write before it fades. Repeat.

  The configuration code was the hardest part. Four separate sessions to extract it complete, each one leaving a dull throb behind her left eye. But it was there now, dense and cramped along the bottom of the page. Her eyes burned.

  Is the core even compatible? Or am I spending fifteen hours on something that won't work?

  She picked up the sphere again. The weight of it was weird for its size, too dense, the surface warm in a way Napoleon's components weren't. One finger to the surface. The filaments came, thin and blue. Two seconds of contact.

  The data fragment that came through stopped her.

  The connection architecture. She'd been checking Napoleon's power housing dimensions for hours, but this confirmed it wasn't just a matter of size.

  She pulled back and wrote fast.

  It fits. The connections match.

  She sat back and looked at what she had. Then text appeared in her HUD without her asking.

  The ability registry. I said I'd prepare it.

  [ABILITY REGISTRY: OPERATOR]

  [LEVEL 0: MACHINE READING] Blue filaments emerge from the fingertips and interface directly with machinery, extracting internal data: programming, structural composition, materials. Information depth and session duration scale directly with the user's Cognitive Overclocking level. Contact with technology beyond current cognitive capacity carries significant risk of mental damage or complete neural shutdown.

  [MACHINE READING - SECONDARY FUNCTION: CODE EDITING] Active connection allows direct reading and editing of programming code. Editing capacity scales with the user's Cognitive Overclocking level.

  [LEVEL 1: COGNITIVE OVERCLOCKING] Comprehensive neural restructuring. Increased processing capacity, reinforced memory pathways, enhanced abstract reasoning. Current capacity allows up to 10 minutes of Machine Reading on compatible technology. Advanced machinery remains beyond safe operational limits.

  [LEVEL 2: PREDICTIVE PLANNING] Multi-branch probability calculation. User perceives simultaneous outcome projections with automatic consequence mapping. Passive ability, always active.

  [LEVEL 3: DISASSEMBLY FIELD] Electromagnetic field projected from the palms. Allows complete deconstruction of technological equipment, suspending individual components in precise spatial arrangement for analysis and repair. Palm rings detach and float independently, keeping the field stable while the hands work freely.

  She read through it twice. "You named all of them."

  Someone had to. You were calling the first one ‘blue threads.’

  “’Blue ‘threads works fine."

  It really doesn't.

  She looked at the list again. The names were good, she'd admit that to herself. "I should be tracking physical changes too. The pain in my ribs has dropped to almost nothing. That's faster than it should be healing."

  I'll flag anomalies.

  She closed the HUD. Ate some of the dried rations. Drank water. Lay down and closed her eyes. She slept for a few hours, more than she expected, and woke with Napoleon sitting on her knee watching her face.

  She sat up slowly and stayed like that for a moment, just looking at him. The chamber was the same around them, the dead scattered where they'd always been, the pillar barrier glowing steady and faint in the distance.

  The pillars hadn't moved in hours. That somehow felt worse.

  Napoleon was so small. She kept needing to remind herself of that, because in her head the space he took up was much larger than his actual size, which was barely bigger than her hand.

  He's fought things that should have destroyed him. For me. More than once.

  She picked up the blueprint and turned it toward him. Pointed at the power housing.

  "Okay, so." She stopped. Started again. "This sphere. The one from the alpha." She held it up. "Inside it there's a core. And I think it fits where your power stone is." She set the sphere down and tapped the diagram. "If it works, you'd have more. More of whatever you use to move, to process things." She paused, looked at him. "I don't know exactly what changes. I've never done this. I'm not sure what it does to you."

  She held his gaze.

  "But I have to open you up to try it. Shut you down first." A pause. "First time doing something like this."

  Napoleon was still for a moment. Then her HUD lit up.

  [I only exist to protect you and to serve you. If this makes me better at that, I accept.]

  A beat. Then:

  [Do not worry about me.]

  She looked at him a second longer than she meant to. "Okay," she said quietly. "Okay."

  She folded the blueprint with the configuration code visible, set it where she could read it clearly, and looked at Napoleon one more time.

  She could wait. Gain more control first.

  But there was a big possibility that someone was waiting outside for her. And if she could change how Napoleon walked into it, waiting made no sense.

  She picked up the blueprint.

  "Your turn."

  She sat against the wall and Napoleon came to her, settling in front of her on the floor. She pressed two fingers to the top of his head, felt the filaments connect the moment skin met metal. The HUD filled with code, lines and lines of Napoleon's programming scrolling across the screen. She found the shutdown function where she'd written it on the blueprint in front of her.

  Just do it.

  She triggered it.

  Napoleon's eyes went dark between one moment and the next. His legs folded and he listed sideways and she caught him before he hit the floor. His body lay completely still in her palm. No movement. No hum.

  She held him for a second longer than she needed to.

  Then she set him on the floor in front of her and raised both hands.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Heat moved through the silver lines on her palms, deep and radiating outward, and Napoleon lifted off the floor as the Disassembly Field extended from her hands. He rose to chest height and hovered there in the dim blue light of the chamber.

  He looked so small like that. Just hanging there, still and helpless, the eight legs that had fought for her now folded and inert.

  As far as she knew, this was the first time she'd ever opened something alive.

  She began to spread her hands and Predictive Planning ignited in her skull like someone had thrown a switch.

  Every possible movement exploded into simultaneous branches. Dozens at first. Then hundreds. Each one a different version of what could go wrong, each one ending with Napoleon on the floor in pieces she couldn't put back together.

  Move her left palm two centimeters too far in any direction and a micro-cable on his secondary communication cluster would snap. Drop the field pressure on the right side for even half a second and two sections would collide, crushing the components between them. Rush the separation on the third stage and the power housing would crack before she could access it.

  Her brain mapped every failure. Catalogued every consequence.

  Her hands were shaking. She noticed only when she tried to hold them still and couldn't.

  One wrong movement and he's gone.

  She stopped moving entirely. Held position. Let the calculations keep running, feeding fifteen hours of blueprint into the probability branches, every measurement she'd memorized crossing against every possible angle. The failures didn't stop appearing, but they started narrowing. The branches where Napoleon survived got slightly wider. Slightly more accessible.

  There has to be a path. Find it.

  Thirty seconds passed. Maybe more. She didn't move.

  Then, between all the failure paths, one route appeared that didn't end in disaster. Not wide. Not forgiving. But there.

  She moved along it and nothing else. Shallow breaths. One stage at a time. The tension climbed into her jaw without her letting it, teeth pressing together until the joint ached. She didn't stop to fix it.

  Napoleon separated into five sections.

  She exhaled for what felt like the first time in minutes.

  His head, two leg assemblies, the rear section, and at the center, his midsection with the small sphere of his power housing exposed. The palm rings lifted away from her hands on their own and held themselves in the air, the Disassembly Field staying stable without her palms occupied, and her hands were free.

  She reached in and took the small sphere between her fingers. Lighter than she'd expected. Warm. She found the release point and pressed, and the sphere opened.

  Inside, a stone the size of a bean, the color of a bruise, somewhere between purple and deep black. Smooth and dense with a faint pulse that wasn't quite light.

  That's what's been running him this whole time.

  And she'd almost lost him more than once.

  She set Napoleon's open sphere down and picked up the alpha's sphere. Opened it. The core inside looked nothing like the stone, compact and dark with machined edges, the surface marked with patterns too small to read. She worked it free carefully.

  Getting it into Napoleon's sphere took longer than she wanted. The core was dense and the housing was small and she had to rotate it slowly, feeling for the alignment of the connection points, stopping every time the probability calculations flagged a wrong angle. Her hands were still trembling slightly. She kept moving anyway.

  It seated with a resistance she felt in her fingertips. A subtle lock.

  She closed Napoleon's sphere. Set it back into the field exactly where it had been.

  Reassembly was slow. Her arms ached from holding the Disassembly Field open and the ache in her jaw had spread into her right ear, pulsing with her heartbeat. She worked through it section by section, Napoleon's blueprint so memorized it felt less like remembering and more like reading something written directly behind her eyes.

  Napoleon came back together.

  She let the field go, the heat fading from her palms as she set him gently on the floor.

  She was soaked through. Shirt clinging to her back, hair stuck to her face. The ache in her jaw was bad enough that opening her mouth felt like a mistake. She hadn't noticed any of it while it was happening. She wiped her face with her sleeve and picked up the blueprint.

  Last part.

  She pressed one hand to Napoleon's body, felt Machine Reading connect gently, the filaments soft this time, controlled. The HUD opened. With her other hand she worked through the configuration code, line by line, each sequence confirmed before moving to the next.

  The last line sat there. Unactivated.

  She looked at Napoleon lying still on the floor.

  What if the new core is too much for his system?

  She thought about him positioning himself between her and things that should have killed him. About his eyes going red. About the weight of him on her shoulder, light and constant and always there.

  She activated it.

  Napoleon's body jumped off the floor, as sparks erupted from every seam and joint simultaneously, dozens of them, spraying outward and scattering across the metal in a ring. His body bounced hard when it came back down, convulsing, legs scrabbling against nothing, sparks still firing from the gaps between his armor plates.

  Then his jaw opened.

  The sound that came out of it hit the walls and came back doubled, a raw high shriek that filled every corner of the chamber and kept going, bouncing off the dead and the broken machinery and the distant pillars. Her ears rang with it.

  "Tera, what's happening…”

  We're both watching the same thing.

  "TERA…”

  One second.

  Napoleon was still convulsing, still screaming, sparks still jumping from his body. Then a different alert appeared in her HUD, flagged and bordered in a way Tera's messages never usually were.

  Napoleon is disconnecting from my control channel. The connection I maintained between him and the HUD. He's separating from it.

  The screaming continued. Then stopped.

  Napoleon dropped. Hit the floor. A few last sparks jumped from his legs and went dark.

  Did I just kill him?

  She was already moving.

  "Napoleon." She crossed the distance and dropped to her knees and scooped him up in both hands. "Napoleon, hey. Hey, come on." No response. His eyes were dark. His body was warm but completely still. "Napoleon, please."

  His body lurched in her hands.

  Then he was convulsing again, smaller and less violent, and his eyes opened.

  She went completely still.

  Napoleon's eyes were active, both of them, brighter than she remembered. But they weren't looking at her.

  They were fixed on the pillars.

  She had half a second before the weight left her hands. One moment he was there and the next she was holding empty air, and when she looked up she couldn't find him in the dim light.

  The pillar barrier pulsed.

  Not like before, not the steady passive glow she'd been watching for hours. The energy between the columns surged, blue-white light intensifying until it hurt to look at directly, and the shockwave defense began to build between them.

  Napoleon was already at the control panel.

  She didn't understand how. The panel sat flush against the base of the nearest pillar, outside the shockwave's range, and Napoleon was on it, eight legs spread wide, blades extended, and she hadn't seen him cross the room. Hadn't seen him move at all. One moment he was in her hands and now he was there, forty feet away, faster than her eyes could track.

  The new core. That was the new core.

  The shockwave kept building. The air between the pillars had started to vibrate, and the light was getting brighter, gathering and compressing into something that was going to release whether she wanted it to or not.

  She stood frozen. No words. No movement.

  Predictive Planning tore through her brain like a current.

  The branches appeared all at once and nearly all of them ended the same way. The shockwave releases before Napoleon finishes. Napoleon gets caught in the blast. The panel triggers a secondary defense. She's alone in the dark with whatever comes next. Failure after failure after failure, mapped out in cold and specific detail.

  One path wasn't failure.

  One. And the window for it was closing.

  "NAPOLEON." Her voice hit the walls and came back at her. "DESTROY IT. EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. RIGHT NOW."

  Napoleon started spinning.

  She'd seen him move fast before. She'd seen him fight. But this was something different from either of those things. He became a blur at the center of the panel, rotating so quickly his body disappeared into a smear of motion, the blades on his legs extended and catching the blue-white light from the pillars as he spun faster and faster. Then he drove himself downward.

  The sound of it carried across the entire chamber. Metal shredding. Components breaking apart under something that hit them from every angle at once. Napoleon sank into the panel like a drill finding soft ground, the spinning never slowing, the blades churning through circuitry and housing and whatever lay beneath.

  The shockwave sphere between the pillars flickered.

  The pressure in her chest dropped for half a second. The vibration stuttered.

  Napoleon kept going. Deeper. The panel's surface collapsed inward around him, sparks shooting sideways across the floor in long arcs.

  The shockwave sphere flickered again. Then went dark.

  The pressure vanished.

  The humming between the pillars dropped in pitch, once, twice, the blue-white light dimming in stages as the field that had been building for hours began to lose its coherence. The columns themselves seemed to shudder, the energy connecting them fraying at the edges and pulling back toward the stone.

  Then the system's voice spoke. Flat. Mechanical. No emotion in it at all.

  "DEFENSE SYSTEMS OFFLINE."

  A pause. Something deep in the structure powered on, a sound she hadn't heard before, low and resonant.

  "ACTIVATING EMERGENCY PROTOCOL. CALLING GUARDIAN."

  The word hit her like cold water.

  Guardian. What is a guardian.

  She didn't have time to ask. From the top of each pillar, a concentrated pulse of red light shot straight upward and passed through the ceiling like it wasn't there.

  "SIGNAL TRANSMITTED. GUARDIAN RESPONSE EXPECTED."

  Then the lights went out.

  Every emergency light in the chamber died at once, dropping everything into darkness so complete she lost her sense of where she was standing. She couldn't see the walls. Couldn't see the floor. Couldn't see the pillars, the bodies, the equipment, any of it. Just black in every direction.

  She stayed completely still. Her heart was loud in her ears. Whatever a guardian was, it was coming. The signal was already sent. That couldn't be undone.

  A click from across the room.

  Two points of white light came on, brighter than anything Napoleon had shown her before, cutting clean beams across the chamber floor. She watched the beams move, watched Napoleon position them against two of the pillars and secure them there with thin lines of web, angling the light down into the gray sand at the center of the reward zone.

  The beams stopped moving.

  The chamber settled into silence.

  Weight landed on her shoulder. Light and familiar, eight legs adjusting their grip without her needing to balance for it.

  She hadn't seen him cross the room. She hadn't seen him move at all.

  Text appeared in her HUD. But it wasn't coming through Tera's channel. The formatting was different, something more direct, without the mediation she'd gotten used to.

  "How did I do, Operator?."

  She opened her mouth.

  Nothing came out.

  by BooksByMandiMay

  THE LAST TECHNOMANCER

  One satisfying career crisis, one planet abduction, and one very opinionated robot later, Maura Everhart has thirty days to survive a multiverse tutorial that wants her dead.

  Maura Everhart was having a bad Wednesday. Keys down a storm drain, a failing game shop, and a locksmith who charged like a surgeon. Then the sky split open, and every adult on Earth was yanked into a tutorial dimension for 30-days alongside initiates from 61 other planets.

  Choose a class. Level up. Don't die. Simple enough. Right?

  Except Maura chose Technomancer, an ancient class so rare the multiverse considered it extinct. Before vanishing the only other Technomancer reshaped the entire systems of reality. Now cosmic powers are watching, and not all of them want to see another one rise.

  Armed with an energy sword she barely knows how to swing, a mechanical robot companion with more attitude than a house cat on a Monday, and an INT stat that's growing faster than her ability to stay out of trouble, Maura has to do more than survive. She has to build. Innovate. Forge alliances with species she didn't know existed yesterday. And figure out why powerful beings are breaking the rules of the tutorial just to get close to her.

  In a world where death is permanent, magic is real, and morals are a thing of the past, the only thing more dangerous than the monsters in the forest is the secret Maura carries: she's not just a player in this game. She might be the reason it exists.

  What to expect:

  - LitRPG progression with stats, skills, levels, and loot

  - Crafting and innovation as core strengths, not just combat

  - Found family forged under pressure

  - Morally complex encounters where enemies aren't always evil and allies aren't always safe

  - A sarcastic, self-aware protagonist who references games and pop culture while trying not to die

  - Multiple POVs that expand the world beyond the main character

  - A slow-burn mystery about extinct classes, cosmic politics, and a multiverse with secrets

  Updates every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. First-person POV. Progression fantasy with heart, humor, and the occasional existential crisis.